Precise Measurement of One-Way Delay and Analysis of Synchronization Issues

When implementing networks with QoS guarantees, precise measurement of all network QoS characteristics is necessary. We need to observe behaviour of various traffic handling mechanisms on different patterns of data, for example, to see influence of handling a traffic aggregate on a microflow behaviour, which is the case in diffserv networks and to check if the agreed Service Level Specification (SLS) is adhered to by both the user and the network. We need a tool that can generate a set of data streams of a specified shape and rate, capture these streams as they pass through a network and computes experienced QoS characteristics. To verify behaviour of scheduling mechanisms, precision around 4 microseconds is needed. This is the time to submit one minimum-length packet on a Gigabit Ethernet network.